"Shatner, who pronounces “Esperanto” with a noticeable French-Canadian accent, also singles out the language problem. Stevens, he recalls, convinced him that Incubus would be a hit because Esperanto had more than 7 million speakers; it did not occur to him that these 7 million people were spread out into a few hundred in every major city around the world, not exactly a recipe for box-office success. “There was a large contingent of [Esperanto speakers] in Liberia,” he notes, “but we couldn’t reach them because there was no telephone.” He also makes the odd claim that Incubus was a big success in France because French people do not understand one another, and thus had no problem not being able to understand the actors speaking Esperanto."